This invention relates to meat scraping machines for cleaning the freshly sawed or cut surfaces of a piece of meat, and more particularly to a meat gripping and moving cylinder, and an integral mount for such a cylinder, for gripping and driving a freshly sawed piece of meat through such a machine.
The faces of sawed meat have customarily been cleaned for reasons of sanitation and appearance. The cutting process is commonly done with a band saw, and this usually leaves residues of coagulated blood, bond dust, marrow, meat particles, fat, and so on, on the freshly sawed meat surfaces. These residues are unappealing to purchasers as they view the meat, so retailers commonly wash and clean the freshly sawed meat before it is put on display.
In view of the time and labor involved in manually scraping each piece of meat with a hand tool, it has long been desirable to automate the cleaning process. Until recently, however, most efforts in this direction have been unsuccessful. Foremost among the causes have been the problems of accommodating meats of all sizes and thicknesses, and of meeting the very strict sanitation requirements of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A.) and the National Sanitation Foundation (N.S.F.), as well as various state and local regulatory agencies. A successful machine must therefore be highly versatile, thorough, and quick, and it must also be completely sanitary in operation and quickly and easily cleanable after use.
Meat scraping machines such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,389,414, 3,439,369, 3,478,380, 3,606,628, and 3,781,936 represent significant improvements in automating the cleaning of cut meats and reducing the manual labor and time heretofore necessary. U.S. Pat. No. 3,781,936, in particular, discloses a meat scraping machine which has solved a number of the prior art problems. It scrapes both cut faces of the meat automatically and quickly, and accepts the commonly encountered thicknesses. Most of the manual labor has been eliminated, and the machine produces a product which is highly appealing to the consumer.